LED traffic lights

There's been a blizzard of responses to my blog on LED traffic lights. There's no doubt LED bulbs are less energy consuming than traditional bulbs. One small Wisconsin city claims it's saved over $40-thousand in a single year. Less energy used, far less maintenance. They deal with the snow-covered lights by wiping them off.

Denver, the mile high city, has been know to get a bit of snow on occasion. They report no LED probs there. This is NOT just an American trend, going to LED traffic lights. America's unofficial snow capital must be Buffalo, the biggest city with the biggest snowfall most years. I am trying to find out what they have done with or about LED traffic lights. Their local rag printed the national LED story without a single local reference. Like "we don't have those here" or "we use 476 LED lights and have found...." Sad state of what was once journalism. Back when there were still newspaper reporters in every town one always took the big national stories and did the local angle.

That original AP story does refer to a single death attributed to snow-covered traffic lights. In most places in most cases drivers know to stop at any marked intersection if the lights aren't functioning. Same thing you would do during a power outage or heavy rain storm.

A British firm just announced it is going to deliver 20,000 LED traffic lights to Turkey.

Here's my original blog if you missed it. Comments on that blog have compared LED traffic lights to: cap and trade, CO2 emissions, illuminators of human stupidity, case of unintended consequences, environmentalism gone mad, etc.